not all who wander are lost

Finding Content in Files With Git

Feb 1st, 2012

Acknowledgment: This is meant to be the Windows equivalent of Anders Janmyr’s excellent post on the subject of finding stuff with Git. Essentially, I’m translating some of Anders’ examples to Powershell and providing explanations for things that many Windows devs might not be familiar with.

This is the second in a series of posts providing a set of recipes for locating sundry and diverse thingies in a Git repository.

Finding content in files

Let’s say that there are hidden monkeys inside your files and you need to find. You can search the content of files in a Git repositor by using git grep. (For all you Windows devs, grep is a kind of magical pony from Unixland whose special talent is finding things.)

There several arguments you can pass to grep to modify the behavior. These special arguments make the pony do different tricks.

# return the line number where the match was found
PS:\> git grep -n monkey
# return just the file names
PS:\> git grep -l monkey
# count the number of matches in each file
PS:\> git grep -c monkey

You can pass an arbitrary number of references after the pattern you’re trying to match. By reference I mean something that’s commit-ish. That is, it can be the id (or SHA) of a commit, the name of a branch, a tag, or one of the special identifier like HEAD.

# search the master branch, and two commits by id,
# and also the commit two before the HEAD
PS:\> git grep monkey master d0fb0d 032086 HEAD~2

The SHA is the 40-digit id of a commit. We only need enough of the SHA for Git to uniquely identify the commit. Six or eight characters is generally enough.

Notice that each line begins with the name of the commit where the match was found. In the example above where we asked for the line numbers, the results were in the pattern:

[commit ref]:[file path]:[line no]:[matching content]

N.B. I had one repository that did not work with git grep. It was because my ‘text’ files were encoded UTF-16 and git interpretted them as binary. I converted them to UTF-8 and the world became a happy place. Thanks to Keith Dahlby and Adam Dymitruk for helping me to figure out the problem.